|
SubscriptionsSites I Read
|
|
|
|
| Well It's been a little while since I wrote on here but with a gentle nudge from Tee I'm starting again.
I have a lot of mixed emotions at the moment with a lot going on in my life. My lovely daughter Anna, her husband james, and her two boys Joe and Leo are now back the other side of the world in New Zealand.
It really has been lovely having them staying with us for the last three Months and watching our grandsons growing up day by day and we will miss them a lot. As some of you may know, I have four sons as well who I only get to see occasionally as they all live a quite a long way away, we have seen our daughter far more than we will have seen our sons over the last year but It doesn't make it any easier when she has gone.
On the other hand she probably feels exactly the same as we do in that It is nice to get back to our own life. I know, over in New Zealand that she has things she does and people she meets and she will certainly be glad to get home again and pick up the pieces where she left off. The same goes for Avril and myself, we have certain things we do etc and routines that we are comfortable with and that is nice as well.
So It was a bit of a bitter sweet moment when I dropped them off at Heathrow Airport last weekend for their 12,000 mile trip home.
The other major thing in my life that is going on at the moment is me in the middle of closing down my business that I have been running for the last 12 years.
Although I'm 66 in the Spring and a lot of people my age have retired It has come very hard for me to get my head round the fact that I am giving it up. It's a sort of a mid life crisis, but I'm too old for that!
I run a small business, along with Avril, Importing and wholesaling ethnic and other goods from Indonesia and China. As part of my job I have been very fortunate in that I have been travelling to both Bali and China 2-3 times a year to source the products and in the process made some very good friends in both countries.
However my main customers have been market stall holders, a business that has been in decline over the last few years. This in turn has now reflected on the amount of business that I am doing and what with the decline in turnover and rising costs I have had to take the very hard decision to close the business next Month.
It is odd, there was a time in my life when I said and indeed wanted to try and retire when I was 50, of course now nothing could be further from the truth!
There is an upside to all of this though. Next Month when I close I will still have a huge amount of stock left in my warehouse, I have started already relocating this to stores and sheds at the rear of my home and I reckon I have enough stock to sell continuously on Ebay for the rest of my life  So although I'm giving up one business on the other hand I will be starting a new retail business! Plus of course I will have a lot more free time on my hands rather than going into work on a 8-5 basis 5 days a week.
I have already booked a couple of holidays  One in January when we will be going to Florida ( not to visit theme parks but just to chill out etc)I managed to get the flights on my airmiles! By booking far enough ahead with a low cost airline I have booked a return ticket to Barcelona in Spain for a week in May as well. The ticket out cost the princely sum of £15 or about $23 and the return just £1, even with the fuel tax the whole lot for the two of us was only just over £100 so a real bargain I thought.
Well that's enough of my rambling for a while..........
| | |
| o
I was reading Swamprad's blog today and was thinking how much I agreed with one of his statements.
"As bad as the economy is, and despite all the awful dramas that we see
played out about us, at least we don't have the foreign invader coming
in and raping and pillaging, and at least we don't have the government
enforcing a new religion and burning all who don't conform at the stake
(I watched the Showtime "The Tudors", you should, too). Despite all the
bad, we still have it pretty good in this country, and I'm thankful."
Over here in the UK it is all doom and gloom on the news and in the papers, today we learnt that inflation had hit 5.2% now, although everything in the shops is going up in price I thought I'd put that into perspective.
Does anyone know what the inflation rate is in Zimbabwe?
in June of this year it reached 11.2 million percent per annum by july that had gone to 231 million percent the estimates for September and October is 550 billion percent and 2 trillion percent!
80% of the population are out of work there is no food to buy in the shops.
And we think we have problems!!!
A 100 billion dollar note worth around 5Cents
I have mentioned it in the past that we grow a lot of our own fruit and vegitibles (well Avril does I just do the rough digging bit! ) we have fresh produce from the garden every single day of the year.
Last summer I decided to have a go at making Rumtopf, If you have never heard of it you are in for a treat. It is a mixture of fruit, sugar and rum, poured over Icecream it is gorgeous.
It is very simple to make (It must be If I can manage it)
I start off with getting a large pot to put it in.
Then I start with whatever fruit is in season, I started with Strawberrys around a couple of pounds which I covered with half the weight in suger let to stand for an hour then spooned into the bowl and covered with rum, then when the raspberries were ready I did the same again and so on with cherries, plums etc until the bowl was full, each time putting half the weight of sugar with the fruit and then covering with rum.
All you need to do then is leave it for 3 Months and you have this beautiful topping for your ice cream. We are still eating what I made a year ago and now I am well on the way to finishing another one that we will start after Christmas.
I hope everyone is having a good week, the weekend will soon be here.
| | |
| I have been literally up in the air last weekend.
Back in May my sons, Steve,John,Peter,David and my daughter Anna-Marie bought a balloon trip for me for my 65th birthday.
What with a combination of poor weather over this summer and me seeming to have lots of things going on I haven't been able to use it until now.
I booked the flight for early Saturday morning but after getting the balloon half inflated it had to be called off due to poor visibility. Here is a photo showing it partly inflated waiting for the visibility to get better.
So the whole thing had to be packed away again!
I was very lucky in that there was still one space left for the afternoon flight which of course I took.
I was amazed at how quiet it was once we were in the air and when the burners were not on, there wasn't a lot of wind but by going up to about 4000 ft we managed to catch about an 8 mph breeze.
They cracked open a couple of bottles of champayne while we were up and we drifted over some lovely undulating green countryside, here is a photo of a golf club we passed over.
A great trip and thanks once again to my sons and daughter.
| | |
|
